Fusionism Was the Deal That Made the Modern Right Possible

Imagine a wedding in which the two families have spent three hundred years arguing about whether the marriage should happen at all. The bride's side believes that a good society is built on inherited virtue, church, family and duty. The groom's side believes the only thing a government should do is protect the individual and get out of the way. They have written dueling books. They have a few colourful insults on file. And now, for reasons of mutual survival, they are being asked to sit at the same table, raise a glass and agree on the menu.

That, more or less, is the story of fusionism. It is the idea that gave the American right its modern shape, and it is a lesson in how a coalition actually gets built: not by pretending the differences are gone, but by finding the argument that lets people with different first principles work on the same side. Let me tell it in order, and then tell you where the deal frays.

The two families

By the early 1950s the American right was a collection of people who did not much like one another. Two groups stand out.

• The traditionalists. Their intellectual ancestor was Edmund Burke, and their modern spokesman was Russell Kirk, whose The Conservative Mind appeared in 1953. They emphasised order, custom, religion and the inherited moral framework of Western civilisation. They feared that a society which cut its ties to the past would fall apart.
• The libertarians. Their heroes were thinkers like Friedrich Hayek, whose The Road to Serfdom came out in 1944, and Ludwig von Mises. Their rallying point was the individual, and their chief worry was the growth of the state. John Stuart Mill, the great champion of individual liberty, was their patron saint.

There was a third group, too, the anti-communists, who had less interest in a philosophy than in a fight. Many of them were former members of the Communist Party, who had seen the thing from the inside.

So the old quarrel, which people sometimes put as Burke against Mill, was not a trivial one. The traditionalist said: a free society cannot survive without shared virtue, and the state may have to help enforce it. The libertarian answered: the moment you give the state the power to enforce virtue, you have lost the freedom you were trying to protect. Both sides had a point, and each side's nightmare was the other side's solution.

Enter Frank Meyer

Frank Meyer (1909 to 1972) is the man usually credited with giving the bargain an intellectual form. He knew the left from the inside: he had been a Communist in his younger years, and broke with the party in the 1940s. He then became a senior editor of National Review, which William F. Buckley Jr. founded in 1955, and he wrote a regular column in its pages for years. In 1962 he published a book, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, that laid out his case.

The argument, in plain terms, goes like this.

1. The purpose of political order is to secure the freedom of the individual person from coercion by others. That is the libertarian insight, and Meyer took it as the foundation. The state's job is limited: defend the country, keep the peace, enforce contracts.
2. But freedom is not the highest good. Virtue is. A free man is free to choose the good, and a society that does not care what its free people choose will soon forget the answer. That is the traditionalist insight.
3. Virtue cannot be forced. An act done under compulsion is not a virtuous act. A man who attends church because the state requires it, or gives to the poor because he was taxed to do so, has not become a better man. Virtue only counts if it is chosen.
4. Therefore the two goods depend on each other. Freedom without virtue does not last, and virtue without freedom is not virtue. The state should therefore protect the space in which free people can choose rightly, and leave the shaping of the character to the family, the church, the school and the community.

That is the deal in four sentences. The libertarian gets a limited state. The traditionalist gets a free society's moral life carried on by free institutions. And both of them get to say, with some justice, that the other is a needed partner and not an enemy.

The label "fusionism" stuck, and it was often used by critics, not by Meyer himself. He did not much care for the name, and he insisted his position was the real meaning of the Western tradition rather than a mere compromise. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he developed the argument in the magazine and then in the book. A later writer, M. Stanton Evans, pushed the case that the American Founders themselves had been fusionists, in a way, by pairing a limited Constitution with a moral and religious people. Whether or not you buy that, it shows how the idea took root.

The glue

Arguments alone do not hold a coalition together. Something else is needed, and in the 1950s and 1960s it was the Cold War. Communism threatened the libertarian, who feared a state that controlled everything, and the traditionalist, who feared an atheist ideology that claimed to replace God and family. So for decades the two families could agree on the central fact: the Soviet Union was an enemy and a strong defence was a necessity.

This is worth pausing on. Anti-communism did more than add a third leg to the stool. It gave the two camps a common cause that made the bargain easy to keep. They could save their quarrels for the pages of the magazine, and they could vote for the same candidates. You can read more about the later shape of the coalition in The Three-Legged Stool Still Holds Up the Republican Party.

The coalition goes to Washington

The fusionist bargain found its first national candidate in Barry Goldwater, who in 1960 put his name to a short book that married limited government to a firm stand abroad; I tell that story in A Slim Paperback From 1960 Gave Conservatives a Platform to Stand On. Goldwater lost badly in 1964, but the organizers who built his campaign stayed. Among them were the young conservatives who had grown up in the movement that Buckley and Meyer had assembled, and who are described in From National Review to the Sharon Statement and How the Movement Took the GOP.

The real test came with Ronald Reagan. His 1980 coalition brought together free-market conservatives, religious voters who had been newly drawn into politics by organizations like the Moral Majority, founded in 1979, and defence hawks who saw Soviet power as the main threat. Reagan himself seemed at ease with the mixture. In a 1975 interview with Reason magazine, he said that libertarianism was at the heart of conservatism, which is the sort of thing a fusionist would say. And he talked easily about family, faith and the flag in the same speech in which he talked about cutting taxes. The 1964 television speech that turned Ronald Reagan into a conservative leader gives you the early version of the pitch.

Win or lose, the pattern was set. For the next forty years the Republican Party's platform was a fusionist document: lower taxes and smaller government for the libertarians, pro-family and pro-life planks for the traditionalists, a strong military for the hawks.

How the deal works at a county convention

Let me make this practical with a hypothetical. Picture a county Republican convention drafting its platform, with two hundred delegates in a school gym and a long list of resolutions. Two of them are on the table at once. The first calls for cutting the county property tax and capping its yearly growth. The second asks the county to restrict where a certain kind of business, one many church members dislike, may open.

A pure libertarian delegate votes yes on the first and no on the second, because the second is the government deciding how people may use their property. A pure traditionalist delegate may vote yes on both, or may be lukewarm on the first if the tax pays for something he values. Neither of them is acting in bad faith. They simply start from different places.

What does a fusionist chair do? Two things. First, he sorts the resolutions into those everyone can support and those that divide. The tax cap goes through by a wide margin, and everybody feels the coalition working. Second, on the divisive resolution he looks for the answer that fits the fusionist principle: decide it at the lowest level of government that can handle it, protect the property owner's right to be heard, and let the community's own institutions, its churches, civic groups and families, do the persuading. That does not settle every argument. It does keep people in the room, and the room is where the next election gets won.

I use the example because the deal Meyer described is mostly a set of habits like these, not a treaty. You keep the shared fight at the front. You argue the difference openly, and you remember that a delegate who loses a vote today will be knocking on doors for the same ticket in October.

The critiques, from both wings

A fair account has to give the objections, and they come from both sides.

From the traditionalist side: "Fusionism makes freedom the first good and virtue an afterthought. If the state does nothing to defend the common good, then the market, the entertainment industry and the technology companies will shape the culture more powerfully than any government could. A conservatism that is only about leaving people alone has nothing to say when the family dissolves and the community fades. We need a state that takes virtue seriously." Some writers in this vein, among them the political theorist Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed (2018), argue that the liberal inheritance itself is the problem. Others on the right have called for a more active government in defence of the family and the community. Their complaint is that the "fusion" has been mostly a one-way street: the economics got done and the culture got neglected.

From the libertarian side: "Fusionism asks us to put up with the war, the drug laws and the surveillance state in the name of the grand alliance. Conservatives are quick to praise liberty in a speech and quick to hand the government new powers when it suits them. The coalition has too often meant that limited government was the thing that got traded away." Libertarian writers, among them Murray Rothbard, who broke with the mainstream conservative movement, argued that the conservative movement was never truly committed to freedom when the state was being used for causes they liked.

Both critiques carry weight. Notice that they point in opposite directions: one says the deal gave away too much to liberty, the other says it gave away too much to power. When two critics complain about opposite things, it is sometimes a sign that the bargain is roughly in the right place, and sometimes a sign that it is stretched past breaking. Honest conservatives will not all agree which.

The answers

Here is how I would answer, point by point.

1. To the traditionalist: Fusionism does not say the state may ignore the culture. It says the state is the wrong instrument for shaping it, and that the family, the church, the school and the community are the right ones. The conservative project is therefore to strengthen those institutions, not to turn government into a moral tutor. That is the case for Subsidiarity Is the Old Idea Behind Keeping Power as Close to Home as Possible and for Liberty Without Responsibility Is a Very Short Road to Losing Both. If you want to argue for a bigger role for government, argue it openly and with evidence, but notice that the same government can be captured by people who do not share your values.
2. To the libertarian: The alliance is a coalition, not a merger, and the price of any coalition is that no one wins everything. The question is whether you are better off inside the tent, shaping the platform, than outside it, losing every argument. Look at the record on spending and regulation, and ask whether the libertarian wing has had more influence from within.
3. To both: The deal was struck against a particular threat. When the threat changes, the terms need to be negotiated again. That is what the arguments of recent decades have been about, and What Libertarians Teach Conservatives and Where the Two Part Ways is the fair-minded place to see where the two traditions agree and disagree.

The verdict

I come down on the side of the deal, with open eyes. Fusionism was the right answer to the question of the 1950s: how do two groups who disagree on the foundations cooperate on the next election? It succeeded by narrowing the question. It did not say that freedom and virtue are the same thing. It said that each needs the other, and that the best way to serve both is a limited government and a vigorous civil society.

Whether the formula still works depends on whether the pressures pulling the coalition apart are bigger than the pressures holding it together. That is a live argument, and I am not going to settle it in a blog post. But I will say this: a coalition that cannot explain to its own members why they need one another will not be a coalition for long. Meyer's four sentences remain the best explanation yet written.

The bottom line

• The modern right is a negotiated settlement. Libertarians, traditionalists and anti-communists agreed to work together because each had something the others needed.
• The argument fits in four sentences. Freedom protects the person from coercion; virtue is the purpose of freedom; virtue cannot be forced; so the two depend on each other.
• The glue was a common enemy. When the Cold War ended, the coalition had to find a new reason to hold together.
• Both wings have a fair complaint. Ask whether the culture or the state has been neglected, and judge candidates by how they answer.
• Know which wing you are speaking to. At a family dinner or a county convention, you will do better if you can state the other camp's case in words it would accept.